[Peace] Grandin: Eat, Pray, Starve: What Tim Kaine Didn’t Learn During His Time in Honduras

[Robert Naiman]

https://www.thenation.com/article/eat-pray-starve-what-tim-kaine-didnt-learn-during-his-time-in-honduras/

Eat, Pray, Starve: What Tim Kaine Didn’t Learn During His Time in HondurasThe
vice-presidential nominee supports policies that hurt the country that was
the “turning point” in his life.


Early in Hillary Clinton’s primary contest against Bernie Sanders, Berta
Cáceres, an indigenous environmental leader in Honduras, was murdered
<https://www.thenation.com/article/the-clinton-backed-honduran-regime-is-picking-off-indigenous-leaders/>
by
a coup regime that Clinton, as Secretary of State, helped consolidate in
power
<http://www.democracynow.org/2016/4/13/shes_baldly_lying_dana_frank_responds>.
Apart for one quick statement denying any wrongdoing—“simply nonsense
<http://latinousa.org/2016/03/09/clinton-campaign-says-charges-of-honduran-coup-support/>,”
a spokesman said of the charges that Clinton was in anyway responsible for
Cáceres’s killing—the Clinton campaign largely ignored the issue. As far as
I know, the only journalist who asked
<http://www.democracynow.org/2016/4/13/hear_hillary_clinton_defend_her_role>
Clinton
directly about Honduras was Juan González, during Clinton’s interview with
the editorial board of the New York *Daily News. *Clinton provided a wordy
and vague answer. She admitted that the situation was bad, that activists
were being slaughtered, but insisted that at the time she “managed a very
difficult situation, without bloodshed, without a civil war, that led to a
new election. And I think that was better for the Honduran people.” For the
most part, criticism of Clinton on Honduras largely stayed on the margins
of the primary process, even as the killing in Honduras continued and
evidenced mounted that Washington was once again was funding old-school
death squads (see the invaluable investigation by Annie Bird
<http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/US-Counterinsurgency-Policing-Tactics-Ravage-Honduras-20160412-0002.html>
).
Now, having beat back that part of the Democratic rank-and-file that cares
about dead feminist activists in small third-world countries, the Clinton
campaign has gone full Sun Tzi
<http://www.sacred-texts.com/tao/aow/aow14.htm>, turning its Honduran weak
point into a strength, or, à la Karl Rove, its vulnerability into a virtue.
In picking Virginia Senator Tim Kaine as her running mate, the campaign has
front-and-centered Honduras—not as a victim of Clinton’s realpolitik
neoliberalism but as a sacred space of healing poverty.
Kaine, a Catholic, spent nine months in Honduras, from 1980 to 1981, in the
Jesuit mission in El Progreso, very close to the company towns and
plantations of the storied multinational banana company, United Fruit.
The sojourn, Kaine says, changed his life. Honduras “was really the turning
point in my life. I was at Harvard Law School and didn’t know what I wanted
to do with my life. And I took a year off and worked with Jesuit
missionaries in Honduras,” Kaine told
<http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1012/26/sotu.01.html> CNN’s Candy Crowley.
“Every day I think of the lessons I learned from my friends there,” Kaine
said
<http://www.elheraldo.hn/pais/982854-466/honduras-cambi%C3%B3-la-vida-de-tim-kaine-el-vicepresidente-de-hillary-clinton>elsewhere.
The experience, he says, set him on his life’s journey to fight for social
justice. Honduras “made him who he is,” said
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/tim-kaines-moral-convictions-and-political-ambitions/2012/10/18/38d473ba-0996-11e2-858a-5311df86ab04_story.html>
Kaine’s
mother, Kathleen.
As soon as Clinton announced her pick, the liberal press converged,
following the Clinton campaign’s talking points that spun
<http://coreyrobin.com/2016/07/24/tim-kaine-and-other-faith-based-politics/>
Kaine
as a progressive. “A Pope Francis Catholic
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/07/22/a-pope-francis-catholic-if-clinton-picks-tim-kaine-will-his-faith-matter/>.”
Fine. To be expected. But that Honduras—Honduras!—is being highlighted as
the beginning of Kaine’s conversion narrative truly is audacious.
Kaine, then twenty-two years old, showed up in Honduras during an
especially consequential moment. The country in 1980 was quickly turning
into the crossroads of Cold War. A year earlier, next door, Nicaragua’s
Sandinistas had won their revolution. Father James Carney, a Chicago-born
Jesuit priest who was executed
<http://www.natcath.org/NCR_Online/archives/032103/032103h.htm> in Honduras
in 1983, recalled
<http://www.servicioskoinonia.org/biblioteca/pastoral/GuadalupeCarney.pdf>the
moment in the Spanish-version of his memoir (published in English as *To Be
a Revolutionary*
<https://books.google.com/books?id=4XBvvreBzfkC&pg=PR10&dq=%22To+be+a+revolutionary%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjFodmu7ZHOAhXGNx4KHb_zAWEQ6AEIIzAB#v=onepage&q=patricio&f=false>):
“If Nicaragua won, El Salvador could win, and then Guatemala, and then
Honduras could win.” Carney said that in early 1980, El Salvador’s
Archbishop Oscar Romero, himself soon to executed, had declared that all
conditions had been met for Christians to join the revolution:  Life had
become intolerable; All non-violent avenues of reform had been tried and
failed; And, considering the misery in which most people lived, it would
have been impossible for the revolution to produce injustices worse than
those that already existed. “The popular war for liberation in Central
America was one single war,” Carney wrote.
At the same time, CIA operatives quietly began to move into the Honduran
capital Tegucigalpa’s discreet Hotel Alameda, and began setting up the
paramilitary network that would execute the Contra War against Nicaragua, a
war that would claim 50,000 lives and lay the Sandinista Revolution to
waste. CIA agents also began to work closely with Honduras’s security
forces, which began
<https://books.google.com/books?id=GDl-bUb-4KIC&pg=PA225&dq=Honduras+disappearances+1980&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj-qKCy1IzOAhXJGj4KHWitB4oQ6AEIIjAB#v=snippet&q=carney&f=false>
their
campaign of political disappearances in late 1979. On January 31, 1980,
Guatemalan security forces firebombed the Spanish embassy, killing dozens
of peasant protestors, including Rigoberta Menchú’s father, an atrocity
that inaugurated a three year genocidal campaign that would claim hundreds
of thousands of Mayan lives. In March 1980, Monsignor Romero was murdered.
Ronald Reagan took office in January 1981, and appointed John Negroponte
ambassador to Honduras. Negroponte, who later in his diplomatic career
would move on to larger operations in Iraq, helped cover up
<http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB151/> the activities of Battalion
316, a death squad that disappeared scores of Hondurans
<http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bal-negroponte4-story.html>. On
May 14, 1980, Salvador’s National Guard, along with a paramilitary unit,
slaughtered
<http://centralamericanpolitics.blogspot.com/2010/02/search-for-rio-sumpul-massacre-victims.html>
at
least 300 people trying to flee into Honduras across the Sumpul River. On
December 11, 1981, the US trained Atlacatl Battalion massacred upward of
900 people in the remote Salvador village of El Mozote. Throughout the
region, including in Honduras, “multinational ‘hunter-killer’ squads on the
Condor model
<https://books.google.com/books?id=tSDg6xa4z2YC&pg=PA232&dq=represion+politica+honduras+1980&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi58Yyy0YzOAhUFNz4KHchOBIUQ6AEIJTAB#v=onepage&q=represion%20politica%20honduras%201980&f=false>”
began claiming victims. Thousands of refugees, from Guatemala, El Salvador,
and Nicaragua, poured into Honduras.
It was into this whirlwind that young Tim Kaine flung himself on his voyage
of self-discovery.
The Jesuit order was on the frontlines of Central America’s political
upheaval. By no means were most Jesuits leftwing, but many, perhaps the
majority, were at least broadly committed to what was called the “social
gospel.” Some, like Father Carney in Honduras and Fernando Hoyos
<http://jesuitascam.org/recursos/biografias/fernando-hoyos-s-j/> in
Guatemala, committed themselves to the revolution and gave their lives.
Others were more intellectual, deciding to master worldly knowledge,
obtaining advanced degrees in political science, economics, sociology,
history, psychology, and anthropology, and then use that knowledge to work
for social justice. The most well-known among this group werethe six Jesuits
<https://books.google.com/books?id=qv9o4qoOnFEC&printsec=frontcover&dq=,+Ignacio+Ellacur%C3%ADa&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjP4cmO-Y7OAhUFcT4KHWoqDXMQ6AEIJDAB#v=onepage&q=%2C%20Ignacio%20Ellacur%C3%ADa&f=false>
who
would be executed in San Salvador in 1989 by the Atlacatl Battalion (the
same U.S. trained battalion that committed the El Mozote massacre).
By the time Kaine arrived in Honduras, the Jesuit mission in El Progreso
was focusing its work on labor issues and the welfare of plantations
laborers and their families.  Jeff Boyer, an anthropologist who did
fieldwork in rural Honduras around the time Kaine was in El Progreso, tells
me that the Jesuits “consistently endeavored to be thorn in the side” of
the company, they had “no qualms going after United Fruit.” Boyer recalls a
split among Honduras’s “North Coast Jesuits,” caused by, on the one hand,
the rise of leftwing Liberation Theology and, on the other, the 1979
investiture of Pope John Paul II, a theological conservative who actively
worked to weaken Liberation Theology in Latin America. According to Boyer,
the U.S. Jesuits in Honduras tended to be more conservative, while younger
Latin American and European Jesuits “consistently held democratic socialist
positions.” (The one exception to this was Father Carney.)
In interviews, Kaine says his mentor in El Progreso was Father Jarrell
“Patricio” Wade—known as Padre Patricio—a Jesuit who spent nearly his whole
life ministering in Honduras and who passed away there in 2014 at the age
of 81. By all accounts, Wade was a decent, caring, and well-liked cleric—a
“bear of a man,” remembers Boyer—but his ethics were more pastoral than
political. Father Carney says that Wade blamed his political work with
peasants for provoking the growing repression against priests.  A
“traditional Jesuit,” remembers Boyer, unable to see the need for
structural change.
Kaine was in Honduras for nine months (though two-year commitments for US
volunteers were the standard for Jesuits). Mary Jo McConahay, a journalist
with longtime experience <http://www.maryjomcconahay.net/>in Central
America, told me that it is “notable that Kaine’s work is being described
as ‘missionary,’ as if fishing for converts, when it was anything but.”
According to his own account, he provided politically neutral technical
training, helping with a program that taught carpentry and welding. Yet, as
Boyer tells me, “if Tim Kaine was working as a Jesuit volunteer in 1980, he
could not have avoided become immersed in these socio-religious, political
currents and cross-currents.  He would have been exposed to both
conservative and generally more left and activist work of his hosts and
mentors.”
Kaine, in other words, had found himself in the cauldron of the Cold War.
“It was hot,” Boyer remembers of the Jesuit debates over what the proper
course of action should be.
None of this, however, comes across in anything Kaine says about his time
in Honduras.Kaine didn’t run for public office until the 1990s, so there is
no public record of what his opinion was of the Contra War, or the
Guatemalan genocide, or the 1989 murder of the Jesuits in El Salvador, or
what his Honduran mentors thought of Pope John Paul II’s efforts to
neutralize Liberation Theology. Rather, Kaine, who has been talking about
his time in Honduras at least since the early 2000s, when he was mayor of
Richmond, uses his nine-month stay as a kind of platitudinous catch-all, to
prove he is a true Christian to Virginia conservatives, to court the Latino
vote, and, now, to convince rank-and-file Democrats he’s a progressive.
Recently, in a C-SPAN interview
<https://www.c-span.org/video/?410707-1/senator-tim-kaine-discusses-life-career&start=0>
, Kaine was asked what he learned about “America” during his time in
genocidal, insurgent, impoverished, revolutionary, counter-revolutionary,
priest- and peasant-killing Central America in 1980-1981. “Happiness is not
that correlated with wealth,” he said; and, since Honduras was a
“dictatorship.… It really taught me about things that we take for granted
here…having a government that is the rule of the law.”
That dictatorship was created and maintained by the US, a fact lost in
Kaine’s uplift. Here’s a report from NACLA from 1981
<https://nacla.org/article/wider-war-honduras>: “Honduras almost outdoes
the stereotype of a banana republic. The vast plantations run by United
Fruit (now United Brands) envelop the countryside, while Honduras is second
only to Haiti in per capita poverty. It has seen 150 governments in 160
years, and spent the last 18 under military rule.” It should be noted that
that 18-year dictatorship was installed by the JFK administration, in a
coup, one of many in Latin America brokered by Washington following the
Cuban Revolution. In 1980, *exactly* the moment Kaine landed in El
Progreso, Honduras “was the second largest recipient of U.S. economic
assistance to Latin America, despite a sparse population of three million.
It has received $3.5 million in military aid since April 1980, with $10.7
million projected for fiscal 1982.” Happiness indeed is not that correlated
with wealth—or at least the wealth that comes in the form of military aid
from Washington.
One story
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2005/11/03/for-kaine-a-faith-in-service/7498d158-20aa-4cc2-8649-8049caedcc13/>
that
Kaine likes to tell—and he’s been telling it for a decade now, through his
runs for Virginia governor and senator, and may again this Wednesday in his
acceptance speech—is how he once tried to refuse a gift of food from a
family with four, malnourished children. Padre Patricio accepted the food,
and when Kaine asked how the Jesuit could take food from the needy,
Patricio told him: “Tim, you really have to be humble to accept a gift with
food from a family that poor.” Kaine say he has “not forgotten the lesson.”
All this Christian charity would be fine, had Kaine, during his time in
public office, especially as Senator, taken political action to help make
food less expensive in Honduras. But he supports NAFTA and the Central
American Free Trade Agreement, CAFTA. Though he wasn’t in the Senate yet to
vote on those treaties, he says anyone opposed to free trade exhibits
a “loser’s
mentality
<http://belowthebeltway.com/2007/05/30/tim-kaine-gets-it-right-on-international-trade/>.”
So while Kaine is decent on immigration, and has signed on aletter
<http://www.foreign.senate.gov/press/ranking/release/11-us-senators-send-letter-to-secretary-kerry-calling-for-a-transparent-international-investigation-on-berta-cceres-death>
to
Secretary of State, John Kerry, asking for an investigation into Berta
Cáceres’s death, he has consistently supported economic and security
policies
<https://theintercept.com/2016/04/12/death-squads-are-back-in-honduras-honduran-activists-tell-congress/>
that
drive immigration and contribute to the kind of repression that killed
Cáceres.
LIKE THIS? GET MORE OF OUR BEST REPORTING AND ANALYSIS
CAFTA has been an unmitigated disaster
<http://citizen.typepad.com/eyesontrade/2014/08/central-america-crisis-belies-caftas-empty-promises.html>
for
the peasants Tim Kaine thinks about every day. It has flooded local markets
with cheap, agro-industry produced corn and other products, leading to a
collapse in the price of locally grown food stuff but a rise in the cost of
food in general. Malnutrition increased under CAFTA, and, during some acute
periods, so did starvation
<http://www.ticotimes.net/2011/12/09/the-children-of-guatemala-are-starving>.
The trade treaty makes it difficult, if not impossible, for local
governments to impose regulations on certain industries, like mining. A
recent report <http://cpc.grijalva.house.gov/uploads/CPC.Kids.First3.pdf>
issued
by Congress’ Progressive Caucus concluded that “free trade agreements,
including the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Central
America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) have led to the displacement of
workers and subsequent migration from these countries.”
In Honduras, extreme poverty has increased
<http://ebrary.ifpri.org/utils/getfile/collection/p15738coll2/id/129947/filename/130158.pdf>
since
CAFTA has gone into effect, as has political repression, especially
following the 2009 coup. Kaine, as far as I can tell, has said nothing
about that coup (his beloved Jesuits condemned
<http://www.masdecerca.com/2009/07/jesuitas-de-america-latina-y-el-caribe-condenan-el-golpe-de-estado-en-honduras/>
it
in no uncertain terms). Watching Kaine talk about Honduras, he does seem
troubled by the country’s poverty and political repression. But like most
neoliberal politicians, he disassociates in his political rhetoric the
trade and security policies he votes for from the catastrophic consequences
of those policies. As I wrote
<https://www.thenation.com/article/a-voters-guide-to-hillary-clintons-policies-in-latin-america/>
elsewhere
about Clinton’s Latin American policies, “there’s no violence caused by
over-militarization that more militarization can’t solve. There’s no
poverty caused by ‘free trade’ that more ‘free trade’ can’t solve.”
Kaine helps the Clinton campaign transform Honduras from a real place,
engaged in political struggle, into an imaginary kingdom of banality. The
sharp political and economic analysis of someone like Berta Cáceres, who
before her death named
<http://www.democracynow.org/2016/3/11/before_her_assassination_berta_caceres_singled>
Hillary
Clinton and US policy as responsible for Honduras’s terror regime, is
converted into the virtues of anonymous poor people offering up their
ever-more costly (thanks to CAFTA) food as a life lesson in humility.  It’s
a neoliberal Eat, Pray, Love.  Or, better, Eat, Pray, Starve.
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